Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

No Flat Writing A lot of writers will worry that their stories seem flat. There’s a reason that they are worrying about that and it’s one of the core elements of good writing. Ready? A lot of the times your story seems flat because all your sentences are the same layout. You want to vary your sentence structure. Take a bit of writing that you’ve done that feels flat—or maybe even one that doesn’t....

This week? This week has been a bit rough for me. But I am still writing. And we are still podcasting! Gasp! I am still doing this because I think that writers write. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Say it with me, okay? Writers write. That’s all it takes to be a writer—the actual writing things down. We write rebellion. We write acceptance. We write through grief. We write through joy. Some...

In our Random Thought, we talk about why people are mean. The link to our source is at the end of these notes. All you all, I (Carrie) am the WORST copyeditor for my own work. I’ll admit it and that’s because as a writer, I’m too close to it to pick out my errors, right? That’s why it’s good to have other people read your stories before you put them out there. So, we (Carrie and Shaun) are going t...

THE ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY Let’s be honest, here. Sometimes I throw the word “sexy” into a podcast title just to get Shaun to pay attention. But the one-sentence summary is kind of sexy. Over on the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog , Randy Ingermanson writes: In that summary, you want: To show us the setting via information about where or when the story is happening. What Ingersoll calls “a paradoxical...

Wendy MacNaughton on her Substack Draw Together talked about negative space this week and she wrote, “Negative Space performs many functions: it focuses our eyes on the subject, it moves our eyes around a drawing or it keeps them still, it allows for visual space/room to breathe, and sometimes it gives the subject an extra layer of meaning. “For example, ever seen this logo before? “Sure, you’ve p...

And how we've blown off writing maxims to be successful There’s a feeling among many writers/bloggers/content creators that our brains are too overwhelmed by a high cognitive overload to want to read anything that isn’t super quick and fast. I get this. There is a lot of information out there in the world. Short-form content is, they say, the key. Tim Denning describes short-form content as “where...

Hey! It’s a quick happy holiday greeting from us. We took a quick pause in our celebrations to make the shortest podcast episode ever. We hope that you are having a wonderful holiday season. It snowed here yesterday and it’s still super cool out. <3 This photo is from outside our neighbor's house.

SHAUN IS SICK! Gasp! He is never sick. But he is, so I've made the executive decision to replay/republish one of our most popular episodes from three years ago. Ready? Let's go! A quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'dangerous' gets a lot of hits. To be fair, so does a quick web search for the words 'flirting' and 'fun.' But we're not here to tell you about the perils and delights of fli...

We improvised this podcast and you know what? You can kind of tell. It's all about making mistakes (a tiny bit about what holds some of us back about making people pay for our work) and we quickly reference this guy! SHOUT OUT! The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.  Here’s a link to that and the artist’s we...

So, recently, Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, who is a writer and investor had a Substack post that really resonated with me. And by recently, I mean yesterday. Anyway, in it Vitaliy said that “ Each Day Is a Separate Life .” You wake up and you are born. You go to sleep and that’s the end of the day/life. You get it, right? This concept isn’t new. It comes from Seneca, this ancient philosopher and thin...

Dogs are Smarter Than People, Writing Exercise, Cool Submission Opportunity So, we’re been talking about dialogue in novels lately and tips about it and the purpose of it. To find any back posts, just head to LIVING HAPPY and search “dialogue.” One of the things that some writing stylists talk about is the three-beat rule, which is credited to Screenwriter Cynthia Whitcomb. Reedsy explains this as...

A few years ago, we posted this episode about dialogue, and honestly? We're . . . um. . . burnt out because of the election and people. So, since we're already focusing on dialogue over on LIVING HAPPY, we're recycling (upcycing) this from a few years ago. Thanks for putting up with us! These next few podcasts, we thought we should get all nitty-gritty with some quick grammar tips or style tips fo...

So, in the world of writing, everyone talks about needing a beta reader and a critique partner . Everyone that is, except Carrie, who has trust issues and survives as a lonely, isolated writer in Maine. What is a beta reader? It's that person who reads your story, gives you some mild suggestions that feel like a big hug. This is a person you want to party with, a person you can cry to, a person wi...

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar. In his book Hit Lit , which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall talks about 12 elements that he thinks really make those super-popular-multi-million-copy bestsellers in American fiction in t...

Dogs are Smarter Than People There’s an old NPR article about writing bestsellers that quotes critic Ruth Franklin’s overview of American best-sellers as saying "No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top 10 of the fiction best-seller list since its inception." In his book Hit Lit , which we’ve been talking about, James W. Hall disagrees, talking...

Dogs are Smarter than People podcast We’ve started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar. Whew. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Not a bestselling way to start a podcast episode. What’s a better way? Well, according to Jack Hall who wrote Hit Lit, “In mos...

We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is  here. In James Hall’s book, HIT LIT, he looks at twelve top-selling novels and tries to find similarities to their success. One thing that he found in the twelve novels is the theme of “America as paradise.” He writes, “America-as-paradise, an idea that so powerfully shapes our national identity,...

So, last week was Shaun’s birthday. Yay, Shaun! We’ve started a series of paid and free posts about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. And today, we’re talking about a main element in writing a hit novel. Some people call it The Big Clock. Some people call it a Ticking Clock. Some people call it The Timer. Dramatic theory is fancy and calls it a Timelock, but basically, it’s t...

A lot of the writers I teach get really freaked out about structure. They go on multiple craft book journeys trying to find the structure that resonates with them, the one that gives them that beautiful a-ha moment. Who can blame them? Don't we all want that beautiful a-ha moment? They learn about pinch points, rising action, falling action, subplots, inciting incidents, midpoints, themes, narrati...

We talked about this a long while ago, and I've revisited it, too, but it's time, my writing friends, to revisit it. So in writing one of the biggest tips that you start hearing starts in around third grade and it’s “SHOW DON’T TELL.” And it’s sound writing advice, but it’s pretty sound life advice, too. How many of us have heard the words, “I love you,” but never seen the actions that give proof...

Readers want questions that they’ll get answers to. They want to be hooked along. They want to unwrap the answer the way people unwrap a birthday present. That’s what Robert Prince says, anyway, writing in his class at the University of Alaska, ”The key to understanding what audiences really want in a story is to understand that the audience doesn’t want to know everything they need to know when t...

Author, podcaster and professor Robert Prince has this thing he does when he watches a movie: the Atomic Bomb test.  “After I’ve watched about 20 minutes of the film I ask myself, ‘If an atomic bomb were to go off and destroy everyone in this film, would I care all that much?’  If the answer is no, I don’t keep watching the film,” he says in his class at the University of Alaska. He has...

Brainstorming . . . Even the word sounds a little creepy. Like there is a storm inside your brain. It sounds... It sounds sort of violent and hazardous and windy. In this podcast, we talk about the storms inside our brain and how those storms can become story ideas. Five Ways To Get Story Ideas Some authors have a really hard time just getting an idea for a new story. They burn out. They can't fin...

Setting is where your story happens. It’s the time period. It’s the physical place. You can have more than one setting. There. That’s the definition. We’re all good, right? Wrong. Let’s really talk about setting. WHAT SETTING DOES Setting is the foundation of your story. It is the ModPodge that has an addictive smell (Cough. Not addicted to ModPodge. Look away.) and glues all the story together. W...

Algonquin Young Readers Will End in September The traditional book publishing world is a bit like the wild west if the cowboys wore pink-framed eyeglasses and could quote Derrida. People are heroes. People are let go. Entire divisions of publishing houses close. And so on. And this continues this week with the changes at Hachette Book Group and its announcement of the closure of Workman: Algonquin...